we had a real deflation during the mid 90’s. A lot of companies went broke because they could not repay debts with dollars more valuable than those they had borrowed only a few years earlier. Money moved away from commodity based companies and 3rd world countries to high tech/service companies as their exposure to commodities was minimal. That’s why we had the dotcom bubble.
Prices of commodities and subsequently of goods that could be manufactured overseas were sharply lower throughout the 1990's, yes. But that's not deflation. There was plenty of money, just not in commodities and Wal-Mart dry goods.
Deflation is a general reduction in money supply, not the sloshing of it from one place to another. Or as I like to say it, overstating a bit, deflation is "no money, no how, no where." You have to go back to the 1930's, before we went off the gold standard, to find that.